Twilight Treasures

Twilight Treasures was the original name I gave to this little game I wrote with my friend Rob. When Nibble decided to buy it and publish in 1988 it they renamed it, I guessing, to be more direct and to the point. They ruined my alliterative masterpiece and so when I later ported the game in 1989 to the PC for Softdisk I gave it its rightful name.

The play mechanic in the game is real fun and simple - avoid everything and get the treasure then return back to your boat. It's similar to Pac-Man. But if I had only tweaked the idea a bit I could have ended up with the sensation that became Insaniquarium (17 years later, though).

Here I explain the code which is one of the driving factors for magazines to print program listings. This game is actually pretty fun when you use a joystick to play.

The secret to getting my games published was to combine a short BASIC program with a 6502 portion (which was the game code). Overall the listing is much shorter by using BASIC for the "back office" work and the asm for the real game code. All 6502 and the listing would be too long. All BASIC and the game would be slow and suck.